Microsoft isn't a victim here. They made decisions that made it difficult or impossible for customers to upgrade their software. They also print money.
Is it a pain in the ass to support a bunch of old software? Yes. Should anyone, anywhere have any sympathy for them? No.
The article suggested that most software should be delivered as a service, so that it would more directly connect the economic incentives with the bug fixing. Then they pointed out how this would have helped everyone involved in this one specific case.
That is a powerfully simple way to think about, I am going to mull that thought of. But yes, at least superficially, it puts customer and vendor on the same track.
I wonder if there are ways it could be abused? Of course there are, we just haven't found them all yet.
Is fixing 0-days sufficient "support", or do you think Microsoft should be forced to actively invest in security updates for end-of-life software?
[0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/13853/windows-lifec...
The subscription is just a way to get rid of the perpetual right to use and effectively raise the rent. My marginal O365 user costs like 2x more because you cannot buy Office anymore in the EA that I have.
At some point, the support stops being pulled from the product budget and starts being pulled from the advertising budget.
Dollars to doughnuts its worth it in the end.
Microsoft actively pursued (and screwed) this market.
Lots of that software is old junk. IBM supports at the OS level applications written in whatever technology was around in 1978 today.
If you wrote your core business application in VB6 or an early .Net Framework, Microsoft cut you off at the knees.
When the car I still drive was as old as WinXP is now, it was part of a 3.6 million vehicle recall for the cruise-control shutoff switch. The fix involved splicing in some kind of bypass in the wiring harness; so that was potentially 3.6 million parts, installed one at a time. If Ford can do that, why can't Microsoft write a patch for XP?